SILENT NIGHT

CONTAINS YEAH, WHATEVER

There seems no end to the production line of thoroughly wretched slasher movies thrown haphazardly together by people who patently have nothing better to do with their time and can't be bothered investing the film with even the most cursory hints of style, panache or even professionalism. You're clearly not supposed to care about it on anything but the most basic level of tits, sleaze and gore, so the makers aren't going to put in any effort at all, even to the extent of making the film look like it was shot at Christmas rather than the middle of May. Frankly it's an insult.

A maniac is going around town dressed as Santa Claus and killing various people he deems to be naughty. That does pretty much include everyone, from drug-snorting pornographers and canoodling couples to sweary little girls and retired cops who might have something to do with a traumatic event in the maniac's childhood. Can the gutsy female deputy (there's always a gutsy female deputy in these things) find and stop him? Crusty old sheriff Malcolm McDowell talks nonsense throughout, everything looks flat and bland and boring, and there's a needlessly protracted scene in which a topless woman is chased, dismembered and fed through a woodchipper.

Silent Night is careless, artless trash with a random bunch of unlikeable cardboard characters meaninglessly and uninterestingly butchered by a maniac who at the end - yikes! - might not be dead after all! How do they come up with this stuff? There's also a scene in which a busty young lady is impaled on a set of antlers on the wall, because Silent Night is a sort of semi-remake of the infamous (and frankly rubbish) Yuletide slasher Silent Night, Deadly Night, in which the one lipsmacking moneyshot was Linnea Quigley skewered on a stag's head. Yes, it's better than Silent Night, Bloody Night (and it's certainly better than that film's lamentable Welsh-based remake), or David Hess' tiresome To All A Goodnight. But for a decent Santa teenkill you're only really looking at the underrated and delightfully grisly Black Christmas remake (the original is a film I never really cared for). It's absolute rubbish.

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